Thursday, August 6, 2015

I'm Interviewing Muses [book report]

I
and most likely every human male since the species first appeared in
the cosmos have been tormented by what has seemed the ultimate
unanswerable question, “What do women want?”

Having
read the above sentence you might be thinking something along the
lines of, “Aha, at last I am about to know the answer.” Forget
it, pal. The only “answer” you will find in Laura Stinchcomb's
amusing little book, I'm Interviewing Muses,
is another question: “What say we just forget about that other
question?”

Stinchcomb's
writing, which can be described as evoking an unthinkable
collaboration between Erma Bombeck and Prof. Irwin Corey, has
persuaded me that even women, no matter what they might say or think
they want, haven't the slightest clue as to what they really want.

One
might expect a man reading such revelations from the mind of an
intelligent, articulate, good-humored and admittedly snarky New
Jersey mother and wife to scream in self-righteous frustration. I can
be as self-righteously frustrated as the next guy, but I did not
scream thusly while reading I'm
Interviewing Muses.
Not even once. I laughed my ass off, is what I did.

An
underlying theme is Stinchcomb's obsession—she's reaching that
stage in life when women refer to each other as being “of a certain
age”--with becoming “a sex symbol.” We learn about her
experiments with collagen injections to puff up her lips, and what
happens at a party when, wearing breast tape, she bends over too far
and reveals too much, and how she claims to have saved her flagging
marriage by, on a whim, deciding to have sex with her husband every
day. It works brilliantly for over a year, she says, until he
pooped out.

On
another, admittedly less connubial whim, she cuts down on her trips
to the drycleaners because “I have decided that I like to hear my
husband ask me in an almost begging way to drop off and pick up his
shirts.”

She
fantasizes what it would have been like having sex with George
Washington. The
George Washington, with all the 18th
century body stenches including that of fecal traces, a permanent
sinus infection and rotting teeth.

She
loves potbellies on men.

Are
we getting the picture here? Is it just Stinchcomb having a little
snarky fun? Or is she ratting out an entire gender?